Description

This lecture asks: how can Muslims and all other post-colonial communities transcend the limitations of political, developmental, intellectual and other dependencies deliberately promoted by European colonial administrations to facilitate the domination and exploitation of colonized communities around the world? For instance, why should the independent state be defined in terms of secular or non-secular although that classification is incoherent for Muslims throughout the world? The speaker will argue that the challenge of “naming” should be organized and coordinated through a global scholarly exchange and transformation. For post-colonial Muslims, this challenge includes acknowledging the benefits of colonial experiences, while striving for meaningful and inclusive development of indigenous social scientific theory and practice, which should be shared with, rather than operating in isolation from, the rest of the world. Such dynamic and creative intellectual independence requires a complex mix of humility and self-confidence, democratic governance and economic collaboration, etc. At the same time, one must guard against neo-colonial imperialism by investing all necessary human and material resources to uphold empirical indigenous sovereignty instead of relying on slogans like “human rights” because the concept, content and practice of human rights itself needs to be liberated from post-colonial dependency.

About The Speaker

Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im is Charles Howard Candler Professor of Law at Emory University, where he focuses on cross-cultural human rights issues, with an emphasis on Islam. He is also a faculty member of the Emory College of Arts and Sciences and the Emory University Center for Ethics. He directs projects on women and land in Africa and Islamic Family Law. During the fall 2009 semester, he was a Visiting Professor of Arabic and Islamic studies at Georgetown University where he taught “The Future of Islamic Law,” and a senior fellow at the Berkley Center. He is the author of African Constitutionalism and the Role of Islam (2006), Islam and the Secular State: Negotiating the Future of Shari‘a (2008), Muslims and Global Justice (2011) and What is an American Muslim? Embracing Faith and Citizenship (2014). An-Na’im holds LLB Degrees from the University of Khartoum and the University of Cambridge, and a PhD in Law from the University of Edinburgh.